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Monday, May 9, 2016

Study: Anti-Harassment Training Could Be Increasing Harassment

Yet another example in the cascading reality of unintended consequences. No good deed goes unpunished. In California, employers with 50 or more employees are legally required to provide at least two hours of harassment prevention training every two years. Yet the leading research on the topic is now showing that these trainings are having the opposite effect by stoking harassment claim fears and fostering resentment.

[N]ew research reveals that sexual-harassment training may have an opposite effect on employees by "making men less capable of perceiving inappropriate behavior and more likely to blame victims."...

[Justine] Tinkler [assistant professor of sociology at the University of Georgia, and co-author of a study that found after men took harassment training, their gender biases were frequently reinforced] has also done research on how these trainings can actually ignite backlash. Men who already feel that women are "emotional and duplicitous in the way that they both want sexual attention, but don’t want sexual harassment" can get their feelings confirmed in sexual harassment training.

Julia Edelman, a professor of law and sociology at UC Berkeley who has done research on the inefficiency of sexual-harassment training, said that one reason for this could be that sexual-harassment training often features "cartoonish, somewhat unrealistic" examples of harassment in the workplace. “We really need more research on what works. All we really know about sexual harassment training is that it protects employers from liability. We don’t know whether it protects employees. We don’t know whether it reduces sexual harassment."...

Studies testing the effects of harassment training are very limited, but some research has suggested counterintuitive and troubling consequences – that after men complete trainings, they may be more inclined to brush aside allegations and discount victims. ...

One Journal of Applied Behavioral Science study that evaluated a sexual harassment program for university employees found that men who participated in the training were “significantly less likely” to consider coercive behaviors toward a subordinate or student as sexual harassment compared with a control group of men who hadn’t done the training. ...

Other studies have shown that when workplaces actively inform men of sexual harassment policies, it can also have unintended negative effects. A study published in the Social Psychology Quarterly found that after men learned about harassment rules, it triggered implicit gender biases, effectively making it more likely for them to stereotype women.